How to plan your community event

Posted July 12, 2016. By Sophie Cassidy

Our Web Summit Ambassadors are organising events in cities around the world over the next few weeks.

Below are the key steps for Ambassadors to host a smooth and effective meetup. If you are not an Ambassador but would like to attend an event in your city, check the bottom of the page for a link to your local Web Summit community page.

Planning your event

1. Select your event type:

We’d love you to get creative in organising your event. We’re excited to see what you come up with and we will do our best to make your great ideas into a reality. As a starting point, here are a few suggestions

– Host a networking meal

– Host a drinks meetup/breakfast/pub crawls

– Host a fireside chat with an expert

– Host a mini pitching competition

2. Book a venue

It is important to keep in mind the type of people that you hope to attend your event when choosing the venue. Where do startups hang out in your city? What coffee shops, restaurants and bars are hot on the tech scene?

Consider the following

– Is your venue easily accessible by public transport or other methods of transit?

– Does the venue have the capacity to host your event?

– Is the venue affordable? Guests will have to pay for their own drinks, so it’s worth hosting in an affordable venue.

3. Create a Facebook Event

You can create your Facebook event on our city community page below. Just click on your city name at the bottom of the article to find your page.

*Don’t see your page? Just contact info@websummit.net and we’ll create a page for your city.

– Choose a cool theme to entice your guests.
This could be a photo of your city/venue or the default image on your community page.

– Your event name should be short and clear, e.g. Web Summit Meetup London

– Location: Make sure the address of your venue is accurate and up to date. Include best methods of transport to the event in the description.

– Date/Time: Double check your date and time is correct to avoid any last minute confusion. Make sure to confirm the correct date and time with your venue.

– The event description is your opportunity to sell it and make it sound great.

– Ticket URL: Tickets are not necessary for the event, so just leave this slot blank.

4. Publicise your event

– Inviting people at nearby startup incubators and asking them to share your event and spread the word.

– Inviting local influential figures such as your local mayor or other relevant politicians or university figures.

– Contacting local students involved with tech i.e. a startup academy or society in your local university

How we’ll help:

– We’ll send an email to our entire newsletter database with links to all your city events.

– We’ll share the links to your city events on our Web Summit social media accounts.

– We’ll link you with all our global Ambassadors in a private Slack Community.

– We’ll share photos far and wide after your event.

Our Communities:

To help you organise events, we’ve created a series of Web Summit Community Pages for cities around the world. Share these pages with your local community as a place to chat with like-minded people before Web Summit. If you can’t find your city, just let us know and we’ll create a page for you.